The Man Who Wanted to Light the World

Nikola Tesla arrived in New York in 1884 with four cents in his pocket and a head full of visions. He had seen alternating current motors rotating in his mind, complete in every detail, before he built them. He would see something grander still.

By 1891, Tesla was demonstrating wireless transmission of electrical energy. He lit vacuum tubes without wires, using high frequency oscillating fields. Audiences gasped as glass bulbs glowed in his hands, powered by invisible forces.

This was not magic but physics. Tesla understood resonance. When two circuits are tuned to the same frequency, energy can flow between them through electromagnetic coupling.

But Tesla wanted more than parlor tricks. He envisioned a world without power lines. Electricity broadcast like radio waves, available everywhere to anyone with a receiver. Free energy for all humanity.

> My project was retarded by laws of nature. The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time.

In 1899, Tesla built a laboratory in Colorado Springs to test his ideas at scale. His equipment generated artificial lightning, producing thunder heard fifteen miles away. He claimed to have transmitted power to light bulbs twenty five miles distant.

The Colorado Springs experiments convinced Tesla that global wireless power was achievable. He returned to New York and began his most ambitious project. Wardenclyffe Tower.

Built on Long Island between 1901 and 1902, Wardenclyffe was to be the first node in a worldwide wireless transmission system. A 187 foot tower topped with a large metal dome. Below ground, iron pipes drove sixty feet into the earth.

Tesla planned to use the Earth itself as a conductor. Pump energy into the ground at one location, extract it anywhere else. The entire planet would become a power grid.

J.P. Morgan provided initial funding, expecting a wireless communication system to compete with Marconi. When Morgan learned Tesla intended to transmit power, not just messages, the money stopped flowing.

> If people would understand the magnificence of what I proposed, they would not hesitate to support it.

Wardenclyffe was never completed. The tower was demolished for scrap in 1917. Tesla's dream of wireless power died with it.

Or did it?